


Checkmate

by journalofimprobablethings



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Campaign: Balance (The Adventure Zone), Hurt No Comfort, I love Lucretia with all my heart, Sad The Director | Lucretia, The Director | Lucretia is a Mess, Wonderland (the adventure zone), also i don't know anything about chess whoops, and there's no way Wonderland wouldn't make her confront those choices, but she made some Questionable Decisions, it is wonderland after all, who better to help with that than our good friend John Hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26178814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/journalofimprobablethings/pseuds/journalofimprobablethings
Summary: Lucretia and Cam are separated for a challenge in Wonderland, and Lucretia has her chess game with an unexpectedly familiar opponent.AKA Lucretia has so many memories Wonderland could use against her, not to mention fears and doubts about what she is doing,AKA Someone in a YouTube comment floated the idea that Lucretia’s chess game was against John and the idea hasn’t let me go since.
Relationships: The Director | Lucretia & Everyone, The Director | Lucretia & Merle Highchurch
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	Checkmate

Wonderland is so much worse than Lucretia imagined.

She and Cam have only made it through one round of Trust & Forsake, two rounds of the Wheel of Suffering, and already she isn’t sure how long they will last. Cam is nursing a broken arm from their battle, and is missing a finger on the other hand.

The twins were ecstatic when Lucretia landed on Brain in the last wheel round.

“How delicious,” Lydia said. “The irony really is just exquisite, isn’t it?”

“And so many memories to choose from!” Edward said. “This is a real treat, we so rarely meet anyone whose experience is quite so…varied.”

“But it makes it so hard to choose,” Lydia pouted. “Oh, well, more for the next round.”

In the end, of course, they made her choose.

Lucretia knows that she chose to keep the memory of the beach year. But she doesn’t know—she can’t know—what she chose to forget. And the only other people who would know, who could hold that memory for her, aren’t here.

Now, they’ve stepped through the next doorway to find, not a room with two buttons, but a perfectly empty room with two doors on the wall opposite. Lucretia’s name hovers in lights over one door, and Cam’s over the other.

“We’re trying something a little different this round,” Edward’s voice says. “Call it a play-test. Usually, we have the group stick together for all the challenges. But this time we’re going to give you each an individual game, just to spice things up!”

“Now, we’ve barely ever done this one before, so we hope you’ll excuse us if it’s a little rough around the edges,” Lydia says. “Be sure to let us know afterwards if you have any feedback.”

Lucretia catches Cam’s eye. He shrugs. What choice do they have?

“Be careful,” she says.

“Right back at you,” Cam says. And he walks through his door and disappears into the blackness. Lucretia watches him go, but she doesn’t move.

A challenge, individually tailored for her?

She doesn’t want to think about who could be waiting for her beyond that door.

“Well, go on then, spit spot,” Edward says.

“Don’t want to delay the fun, do we?” Lydia says.

“No, we certainly don’t want that,” Lucretia mutters. And she steps through.

* * *

For a moment the darkness of the doorway envelopes her, and as with every other time, a tiny part of Lucretia’s brain is afraid that the next room will not materialize, and that she’ll remain suspended in this boundless void.

Then the darkness pulls back, she is standing in a boardroom. It is sparsely furnished: a long wooden conference table with black chairs set in the middle of the room, a potted plant in one corner. The far wall is one huge window looking out at a blazing orange sunset.

The only other person in the room is a man in a sharp suit, expertly tailored. He is standing with his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking out the window at the sunset. He turns when she enters, and smiles a smile as sharp as his suit.

“Hello, Lucretia. Please, have a seat.”

He gestures to a seat at one end of the table, where, Lucretia realizes, a chess set has been set out, perfectly centered.

Then it clicks.

The chess set. The boardroom. The endless orange sunset. Merle described them in detail after his first trips to parlay with the Hunger. And he described the man standing in front of her now.

Lucretia takes a step back, and the man smiles wider.

“Ah, you recognize me. Good. I expect Merle has told you a lot about me.”

“You’re not really him,” Lucretia says. She knows enough now about the way that Wonderland works to know that none of this is real.

He shrugs. “No, I’m not. I’m your…conception of him, you might say?” He walks around to her side of the table, pulls out a chair for her. “But that’s good enough to be going on with, don’t you think?”

Lucretia sits in the offered chair, slowly. Part of her mind, the part that can still think analytically, is looking at the chess board, thinking about what the game of this room is, what the twins are trying to get from her, how she can get out of this one intact. But the rest of her thoughts have been overtaken by a rising whine of panic as John, the Hunger, the enemy they all have been running from for a hundred years, sits down across from her.

“How is Merle, by the way?” John asks. He leans back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other. “I haven’t seen him in a dog’s age. I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s forgotten all about me.” And he grins at her, a wolfish grin, all teeth.

Lucretia’s hands tighten on the edge of the table. Her breath comes short and sharp, and with each breath a little black smoke escapes her mouth and floats up towards the ceiling.

John laughs.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t bait you. But you really just make it so easy.”

Lucretia forces her hands to relax. “It’s only to be expected,” she says. “Isn’t that the point of this place?”

“True enough.” He swings himself back into the table with the ease of someone who knows they are in complete control of the room. “I like you, Lucretia. You see things as they are, and you’re not afraid to point them out. I value that kind of candor.”

Then he gestures to the chessboard.

“I thought we might play chess. I did always enjoy my games with Merle.”

“Just chess?” Lucretia asks. She is good at chess.

“Well, this is Wonderland, so naturally there has to be some sort of stake. Otherwise where’s the fun?”

 _Fun_ , Lucretia thinks bitterly. Out loud, she keeps her voice as even and pleasant as she can. “Naturally.”

“So, what shall we wager?” John says. Then his grins that wolfish grin again. “Oh, I have it. You’ve stolen so much extra time, as you all hopped from plane to plane trying to get away from me. Why don’t we take some of that time back?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you lose, Wonderland will take…hm, let’s see. Say, twenty years? If you lose, Wonderland will take twenty years of your life. Not of your past, we can’t do that—though that would be…apt. We’ll just take twenty years of your remaining time.”

 _Twenty years._ It’s a blink of what they’ve lived so far, but if this is their last cycle, it means she’ll have so much less time left.

“And if I win?”

John spreads his hands. “You continue as you are, young and unscathed. Isn’t that enough?”

Like every other deal she has been offered in Wonderland, it is horrifically unfair. But like every other deal in Wonderland, it’s a deal she can’t refuse.

“Fine,” she says.

She studies the board for a moment, thinking through a strategy, trying to think what type of game John or the twins might try to play. Then she reaches out and moves one of the white pawns forward.

“Let’s play.”

* * *

They play. And they both play well, but it is not an even match.

Lucretia is good at chess—but John is better.

As they play, John asks her questions about how she is finding Wonderland, how Merle and Taako and Magnus are doing, what she thinks Barry is up to, did she ever find out what happened to Lup. It’s a steady stream of small talk, if the goal of small talk were to take stabs through every chink in your companion’s armor, to make them confront their worst mistakes and their worst fears and their worst failures.

She’s been trying to block it out, to not answer him, to concentrate on the game. But the twins created John from her mind, and he’s not saying anything to her that she hasn’t already said to herself, in her darkest moments.

It’s been over an hour, and Lucretia has used every trick she knows, every cunning stratagem. But still, she is losing.

She is surrounded by a thin cloud of black smoke.

And as the game progresses, she starts to get careless. She moves a rook, and John instantly sweeps in and takes it, strengthening his position.

“Come now, Lucretia, you’re not paying attention,” he says. “Don’t tell me you’re tired of the game.”

She is tired of the game, sick to death of it. But she says nothing.

“Would you rather play with Merle?” John asks.

And as he says it the boardroom is gone, and she’s sitting in the lounge on the Starblaster, the light of some long-gone world filtering through the porthole. And where John was sitting across from her instead there is Merle, in his ridiculous flower-patterned shirt that he insisted on wearing whenever he wasn’t in uniform—Merle, looking just as he did the day she left him in his little house on the beach.

The sight of him sitting right in front of her takes her breath away.

“He’s whooping your ass,” Merle says.

She used to play chess with Merle all the time, in between his parlay sessions with John. He said it was good practice, and she always enjoyed the games: the occasional banter, the careful planning and strategy. The ability to sit in silence and concentrate on the game, without either feeling the need to fill the silence with talk. She misses those games, she realizes—just another thing she has tucked away and not allowed herself to think about.

Merle surveys the board now, one hand hovering lightly over the pieces.

“Do you think I still know how to play chess?” he asks. “Now that I’ve forgotten all these games with you, and with John, do you think the skills still stick around?” He places his hand on one of his knights, but doesn’t move it. “Maybe I’m just really good at chess and have no idea why.”

Somehow, that simple image crushes her.

“Merle, I—I’m sorry—”

“Focus on the game, Luce,” he says. “There’s no point in apologizing to me. You’re letting them get the best of you.” He moves his hand from his knight to a bishop, pushes it forward.

“Check, by the way.”

Lucretia looks at the board, at the black pieces hemming in her king on all sides, and suddenly she is just so, so tired.

She doesn’t want to play this game anymore.

Would it be so bad, she thinks, to let them get the best of her? After all, what is twenty years in a lifetime that spans over a century?

She puts her head in her hands. Just now, she doesn’t have it in her to hide how she is feeling.

“I don’t know what to do, Merle,” she says. Black smoke rises out of her with each word.

“You do what you always do,” Merle says. “You keep going.”

 _Keep going._ Yes.

For Merle’s sake, for all their sakes, she has to keep going.

 _You’re here for the Animus Bell,_ she tells herself. _You’ll get through this, and you’ll get it back, and then you’ll—_

“’Course, that doesn’t always seem to work out for the rest of us, does it?” Merle continues, interrupting her train of thought.

“Excuse me?”

“You keep going in your quest to save the world, and we all live with the consequences of your decisions.”

He’s looking her now with an expression that’s not quite Merle-like.

“It’s a bit narcissistic, don’t you think,” he says, “to believe you know better than the rest of us, how to save the world?”

“Merle—”

“And not only that, but to force that kind of change on us, to make us new people, give us new lives, without giving us a say?”

“Stop.”

“Now me, I’m adaptable. I’ll do all right pretty much wherever you put me. With family, on my own—I’m easy.” He pauses. “But making Barry and Taako forget Lup? That’s cold, Lucretia. That is stone cold.”

Lucretia feels a familiar pit yawning in her stomach, the pit that opens up whenever she thinks about what the Relics—and her redaction—have cost all of them.

“The search for her was killing them, Merle,” she says. “I couldn’t stand to see what it was doing to them. And on top of what the Relics were doing? I only wanted to spare them pain.”

And suddenly, Merle is angry, as angry as she has ever seen him. He sits up straighter and jabs a finger at her.

“Who are you to make the decision for them—whether they could bear that loss? To decide how they handle their grief? Who are you to decide that they’ll be happier never having known that love at all?”

“I only—I was trying—”

She can’t get the words out, can’t formulate all the good, firm reasons she has for doing what she did, reasons she has repeated to herself over and over. And Merle doesn’t wait for her to find her words.

“And this savior kick you’re on, _fixing what we broke_? Let’s be honest, Lucretia.” Merle’s tone has a nasty edge to it, one she’s never heard in his voice before. “Is it really about saving the world, or about proving that the rest of us were wrong?”

“No—”

“How much of this is your pride, you wanting to prove that your idea was the better one, in the end?”

She has her hands to her head now, as though she can block the vitriol coming from the other side of the table, from the being that looks and sounds so much like Merle, except she has never heard him sound so cruel.

“This isn’t you talking,” she says. “You’re not really Merle. This is Wonderland.”

He shakes his head. “You’re right, it’s not Merle talking. He’s too forgiving to ever be this honest with you. But it’s not Wonderland, either. This is you, Luce. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.”

He watches her for a moment, and then he sighs, a short exasperated sigh.

“You know what? I don’t think I want to play with you anymore. I’ll hand you back over to John.”

She looks up.

“No, Merle, wait—”

But then he is gone, and John is back.

“Well,” he says. “Seems your family isn’t very happy with you.”

Lucretia is sitting back in her chair in the boardroom, her head still in her hands. She doesn’t move when John speaks.

“Leave me alone, “ she says.

He chuckles, softly. “I would love to, Lucretia, really I would. But we’re still playing. And it’s still your turn.”

She looks up at the board. In the cascade of venom from Merle, she forgot about the game. She looks and looks, but she can’t see a way out of the check he put her in. The sunset light from the window gilds the edges of John’s black pieces, but has turned all her white pieces a wan orange color.

“Can I ask you a question, Lucretia?” John says, after a long silent moment.

Lucretia shrugs. _Focus on the game, Luce._

“Do you really think you can defeat me?” John says. He has leaned back in his chair, his chin resting on his hand, watching her. “I’m not just talking about the game, here—though I think we can all look at the board and see the answer to that one. I mean me, the Hunger. Do you really think you can starve me out?”

She meets his eyes across the chessboard. It’s another question she has asked herself countless times. And as always, she arrives at the only answer she can, because the alternative is not acceptable.

“Yes,” Lucretia says. “I do.”

She looks at the board and she finally sees it, a way to break the check. She moves her pawn into place, and John makes a small noise of approval.

“How do you know I won’t just hop skip jump over to another reality, start my own cycle?” he asks.

“We have the Light,” Lucretia says. “You—the Hunger can’t do what it does without the Light. If we cut it off, then it won’t be able to expand anymore.”

His attention is on the board, and when he speaks it’s almost offhand, only part of his mind on their conversation.

“And you sacrifice all the worlds I’ve consumed already. You end any possibility of ever rescuing the planes you’ve lost.”

Lucretia closes her eyes. “I don’t think there’s any way to save them,” she says, but she thinks of Lup, and what she said after they almost destroyed the robot kingdom. How they promised those souls, so so long ago, that they would find a way to restore their world if they could.

And she says what she has told herself a thousand times in the last year, every time her resolve has faltered. “It’s what needs to be done,” she says. “It’s the only way to keep this world and all the other worlds still out there safe.”

“How practical you are, Lucretia,” John says. “How goal-oriented. I admire your ability to look past what others might want to what they truly need.”

 _That’s not what this is, that’s not what I’m doing,_ she thinks. _I only wanted to fix what we did, for my family to be happy again. That is not who I am._

But a small sly voice surfaces in her head and whispers, _Oh, but isn’t it?_

“It’s the only way to stop it,” she says.

“But how do you know? What if there’s something you missed?”

John leans in close over the chessboard.

“What if you do this, all this, the redaction and collecting the relics and casting your barrier, and it’s not enough? What if, after you betrayed your family and scattered them to the winds, you still fail, and I still win? How terrible that would be.”

He grins his wolf grin, a smile full of teeth and hunger and terrible glee. He moves a piece.

“Checkmate.”


End file.
